The Star - News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area

When we think of bravery, we have a tendency to think big.

Actually, acts of bravery are all around us, some more apparent than others.

While in Vietnam a number of years ago I met a medical doctor who was captured by the Viet Cong and held captive four years.

It wasn’t unusual at the time for people to turn up missing.

The doctor was held in a jungle field hospital where he worked on soldiers who were wounded or people who came down with jungle diseases.

He was somewhat philosophical about it all. He reasoned that he was trained for this kind of work, and he had plenty of it there.

He was closely watched, he said, and as the months rolled by things got a little more relaxed.

They let him do things when he wasn;t busy and he developed a butterfly collection and caught a small alligator and stuffed it.  I have both, a personal gift from him to me.

After four years he took advantage of a more relaxed time and took off through the jungle and escaped.

The doctor said he was terrified at first and was roughly treated until he performed some medical feats that pleased them.

I can’t imagine how brave he was to survive such an experience.

We have a lot of first responders in our community who are brave in their own experiences.

My grandson, Travis Irwin, who works for the city of Grand Coulee, has trained as an EMT and is also a volunteer fireman at Coulee Dam.

He has gone out on over 100 ambulance calls and rarely misses going out on fire calls.

We have hundreds of local folk who regularly answer the calls.

When I first moved here, I met a man in the Rotary Club that had been a skipper on merchant ships that ran the gauntlet of Nazi u-boats that sank a high percentage of tonnage. The ships were carrying arms and supplies for English forces who were battling the nazis.

At first, the ships sailed without escort. When the losses of ships being torpedoed rose so high, destroyers sailed with convoys.

This man knew what he faced when his ship left port. He had seen a number of ships in his convoys go down.

I have always considered him to be a brave man. He made it through the war and retired for a time here. The dry coulee land apparently appealed to him.

My wife’s nephew, Gary Compton, of Boise, is among those I would call brave.

He started his law enforcement career in Ketchum, Idaho, continued it in Boise, and when he retired at Boise he was a captain.

After retirement he signed on with the state department and other federal agencies to go overseas to help train law enforcement people in those places.

He spent a year in Lebanon, nearly a year in Iraq, and shorter stints in Nepal, Senegal, Togo, Rwanda and Liberia.

Not vacation places. I communicated with him frequently, and he didn’t complain.

After several years, he put it all behind him and took a job in Boise — you guessed it, in security.

I consider all those training exercises as acts of bravery.

And closer to home, our daughter, Kathy Lucas Beck, battled cancer for five years, all the time being a source of encouragement for many others.

For long months she battled back, with a lot of help from a neighbor, Jill.

Now she supports, encourages and makes life meaningful for her two aging parents.

Look around you, recognize and appreciate brave people everywhere.